Happy Canada Day!
Friday, July 1st, 2011
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Happy Canada Day, indeed! I woke up yesterday morning to a surprising email announcing a one-day 50% off sale on the animation software for which I’ve been saving up in anticiapation for the 25% off Christmas sale (6 months away).
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The Canadian company with the goofy name “Toon Boom” creates 2D style digital animation software that’s like Flash, but more user-friendly (for me) and designed specifically for animation projects (rather than interactive java-powered website projects). For the past few years I’ve been slowly developing some skills with an older, academic version of this software. The new version includes more advanced features such as variable rotation velocity (allowing smoother limb movement on figures), pegs that can be adjusted frame-by-frame instead of permanently fixed, and images that can be rotated in a 3D space rather than only perpandicular to the camera’s POV. These features probably don’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t use this (or similar) software, but they’d be like the difference between a rotary-dial telephone and a touch-tone telephone: these advances not only speed up the production process, but they also opens up many other options that weren’t previously possible. Since the old version was outdated enough that my projects couldn’t be imported to the new version, I decided to hold off production of “Nether” until I could afford the new version (so I wouldn’t have to do the same work twice, designing and building my characters’ “puppets” into both softwares). Now that I have the pro-grade software, I can stop merely practicing and start production!
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Or can I…?
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When I got my old, academic verison three years ago I had been practicing on a very basic, hobby version of the software. And I was overwhelmed with the number of options presented by the newer version. I had expected to take the processes with which I had become familiar and simply apply them to the new version, but this was not as simple as I thought. I’m a slow learner when it comes to new procedures, and it took me awhile before I understood some of the changes from one to the other. Likewise, when I installed and opened my new version of Animate v.2 on my computer last night, I realized there were vastly more menu items, and unfamiliar buttons, and features that I couldn’t immediately find… It’s like sitting behind the wheel of an unfamiliar car - wow, everything’s in a different place and I’m reaching in the wrong directions for things. So I have a lot of tutorial videos to watch and a little more practice to do before I can actually start production. But I’m much closer now than I was two days ago! And I’m so excited.
